The Processing Mechanism Of SPT Superiority Effect In Action Memory From The Information Representation Perspective

Action memory refers to the capacity that an individual remembered what actions we did.It emphasizes the effects of the physical and the enactment leaded by bodies on memory.Series of simple action phrases,consisting of a verb and an object(e.g.,open your book,click the mouse),were presented successively to participants who encode them either by enacting them(reading and enacting these phrase,Subject-performed Task,SPT)or verbally(reading the presented phrase,Verbal Task,VT).The presentation of action phrases could be visually or auditory acoustically.The amount of remembered simple actions after each encoding condition respective memory test was assessed and had been shown the improvement of the to-be-remembered action phrase in the former condition.Researchers referred this phenomenon to as “enactment effect” or “SPT superiority effect”.The mechanism of enactment effect has received more attention in recent years.The information processing view has provided a level of analyses of the enactment effect regarding its underlying processing base: action memory was strategic process or non-strategic process as well as enactment can enhance the item-specific process or relational process.Another level of analyses of the enactment effect were several theoretical accounts.Some researchers had put forward the multiple codes view,motor encoding theory and episodic integration theory regarding the “component”obtained by enactment.These interpretations focused on different aspects,which were in debated with each other.However,they all shared a common idea that the traces of memory would be deepened by these “components” in the context of SPT learning.The different components contributed to the progress of memory when participants performed the action phrases.Thus,it is possible that the memory advantage of SPT did not reflect a single homogeneous effect but rather a set of micro-effects.Many of these components were represented in an SPT task and contributed to the specificmemory advantage.A review of the available literature on action memory during three decades reveals that there were hardly studies paid attention on the mechanism of enactment effect from the perspective of information representation.Specifically,there were several points as follows:(1)The processing mechanism of action memory was not clear and there was no study focused on the representation of action memory.(2)It also has been not clear what components played a role in representations comprising a net of components.(3)The effects of information representation on enactment effect were not yet clearly reported when the information was represented in the form of independence and integration respectively.(4)The motor information used for the execution of actions contributed to SPT superiority effect as a critical component.It is still controversial that motor information was processed by single conceptual system or special motor encoding system.In addition,research methods may be insufficient.The present study adopted the SPT Paradigm and retrieval-practice paradigm to investigate the origins of the enactment effect while the information was represented in independent and integrated modality respectively.There were three studies in this article.The first study explored the representation of independent information in the action memory,including three key experiments and one excluded experiment.Experiment one was to investigate the characteristic of semantic representation in the context of SPTs.Experiment A excluded the impact of bilingual individual's semantic stored characteristic on enactment effect.Experiment two reported that the characteristic of imagery representation in SPTs and VTs as well as the characteristic of motor representation was explored in experiment three.The second study,comprising three experiments,was to investigate the representation of integrated information in SPT and VT learning.The effects that integration of semantic and imagery representation,semantic and motor representation,imagery and motor representation on enactment were reported respectively in experiment four to six.On the basis of study one and study two,study three summarized the origins ofenactment effect regarding these “components” by performing actions.There were two experiments in this part.This study conducted experiment seven to explore the individual's structure of internal mental representation during the processing of action memory.In experiment eight,we analyzed the contribution of every “component” on enactment effect.The three studies got these conclusions as follows:(1)The information of semantic was represented in action memory processing,and there was no difference between SPTs and VTs for semantic representation,showing that there was similar semantic processing in two conditions.(2)The storage characteristics of semantic would not affect the size of enactment effect,when participants learned the Chinese action-related phrases.Nevertheless,the size of enactment effect would be affected by different semantic contents while participants learned the English action-related phrases.This result indicated that the storage characteristics of semantic did not affect the size of enactment effect was only suitable for native language materials in testing.(3)The information of imagery was represented in action memory processing,as well as the representation between in SPT learning and in VT learning had a significant difference.The level of imagery representation was stronger in the context of VTs than that in the context of SPTs.It shown that in VTs the information of imagery might be processed more.(4)The motor information could be represented in SPTs and VTs,with different representation levels.The result revealed that enactment could enhance the process of motor information because there was better motor representation in SPT condition.(5)Analyzing the information's integrated representation,we found that there was better semantic and imagery integrated representation when subjects performed the action-related phrases,and the integration representation between semantic and motor information was stronger in VTs condition,and there was no significant difference between two conditions while the imagery and motor information was represented.(6)In action memory processing,the size of enactment effect was larger when information was represented independently than that integratedly.By the multiplesystem approach assumed that processes between different systems took place rather independently of each other.If information was processed simultaneously or in close temporal contiguity by the same system,the processes should impair each other by mutually overwriting their traces.Therefore,the present study inferred action memory may be a single conceptual processing.Moreover,representing the single information,motor component had the largest contribution to enactment effect.As well as the integration of semantic and imagery representation also had largest contribution to this advantage with representing integrated information.(7)The internal mental representation in SPT learning was distinctive with that in VT learning on accounts that the time of learning phrases by enactment was longer than that of learning verbally.But representations comprising a net of components were of similarity between two encoding conditions,including semantic information,imagery information and motor information.Only the levels of representation were various between SPTs and VTs.In other word,the internal mental representations in two conditions were different in quantity instead of quality.The paper investigated the origins of enactment effect from information representation view,and figured out what representations would comprise a net of components.This provided a new perspective and evidence for the research on the processing mechanism of action memory in the future.Research on representation components,similar to multiple system approach,can be used to analogize the action memory system's processes.In addition,the methods,using retrieval-practice paradigm and SPT paradigm in action memory,could provide a new perspective for the future research,as well as the paper extended the using of retrieval-practice paradigm from retrieval-induce forgetting research to action memory in order to understand the origins of enactment effect.Moreover,the applying also could provide an evidence that individuals' forgetting could be prevented by enactment.